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London: CrossRail Finally Being Built?

During PM's question hour recently David Cameron produly boasted that his government is building CrossRail - a fast rail link slicing from west to east across central London - a scheme that has been on the drawing boards for a few decades now it seems.

And if so it is about time that London joined the ranks of just about every other major European city with such a rapid train (or metro) link - like Paris and their RER trains - German cities with the S-Bahns, Barcelona and Madrid with train lines linking far-removed stations - Brussels and now Amsterdam with the soon to open if not opened super metro slicing from north to south thru town.

Well yes a Google check does indeed doth confirm Crossrail is for real! Wonder if Oyster Cards will be accepted and if it will be a part of the London Tube scheme or a separate fare like the Heathrow Express and a super expensive fare to boot?

Crossrail - Crossrailwww.crossrail.co.uk/Crossrail is the new high frequency, convenient and accessible railway for London and the South East. When the service opens Crossrail trains will travel from ...

Crossrail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossrailCrossrail is a railway, 118 km (73 mi) in length, under construction in South East England. It will link Berkshire and Buckinghamshire via Greater London to ...
History - Design - Plans - Management and franchise
Images for CrossRail London

It is a London metro train servicing London so I would be shocked if oysters weren't accepted, that would make no sense...we have a station being built on my complex...oysters are accepted on overland trains farther afield than cross rail...

Well I know Oyster Cards or their 2018 improved equivalent will be accepted but what I meant was at normal Tube fares - meaning a flat fare anywhere the Tube goes and thus from one end of the CRail to the other - if that is the case seems like a huge money loser to me - Paris' RER charges the same as the metro within the Peripherique, looping around what is called central Paris but outside of that the fare increases as the distance traveled - I would expect Crossrail would want to do the same - so that was my question, of which an answer too is probably mere speculation at this time.

I had rather assumed it would have a separate fare arrangement as a commercial investment, like the Heathrow Express. But if Wikipedia is to be believed, only the Heathrow branch will continue to carry a special fare. Otherwise it's supposed to be integrated within the TfL Oyster scheme within the London travel zones, but I haven't seen any official announcements yet, nor is it clear how fares for people using it to commute from outside London will relate to what they pay on national rail services at the moment. No doubt much will depend on how big the final bill is, and what's been raised from business levies and the like.

The complications of having a premium-priced line that connects so much of the TfL area to the rest of the area I'd have thought would rule out the idea of special fares on Crossrail: at present only above ground trains to Stratford International and Heathrow don't accept Oysters etc.

At present, there's been no serious suggestion to charge different prices for Crossrail services outside the TfL area from those currently charged for, say, Maidenhead-Paddington.

Oyster technology easily allows all fares within Crossrail to be paid by Oyster: all that's needed is to install Oyster readers at the outlying stations (they all - or virtually all - have electronically controlled platform access already.) In fact there is (or was) a project to extend Oyster nationally, though that seems to have slipped out of the news lately,

The whole point of London's fare system is that we DON'T have flat fares on tubes or trains. PQ's "normal Tube fares - meaning a flat fare anywhere the Tube goes and thus from one end of the CRail to the other" implies he's been on the Dulux again.

what about that super tramway that was to cross London north to south - Croydon to Highgate or whatever - going over Waterloo Bridge over The Thames? why has London so little light rail, much cheaper to build and less destructive?

>>what about that super tramway that was to cross London north to south - Croydon to Highgate or whatever - going over Waterloo Bridge over The Thames?<<

That was what used to exist, but I never heard of a serious scheme (rather than a conceptual suggestion) to reinstate it. A crucial part of the old trams was the Aldwych tunnel, which made way for a car underpass in the 60s.

>>why has London so little light rail, much cheaper to build and less destructive?<<

Because most of the streets are simply too narrow for trams and cars and lorries, not to mention bikes and pedestrians. Manchester and Sheffield brought trams back by basing them on existing suburban railways and having only a relatively small amount of engineering to connect them up at street level in the centre. Something of the sort has been done down in Croydon and to its east and west, but there are only relatively few parts of central London where you could reinstate trams without a substantial amount of re-engineering at considerable expense and major upset to the devotees of the Great God Car, and most of those journeys are done quite adequately by bus anyway. Edinburgh's recent experience hasn't been encouraging.

I doubt few people in Edinburgh would agree about "less destructive", and the only people in Liverpool who'd agree about "much cheaper" are those who assumed the national taxpayer would pick up the tab for their extravagant project that never got off the ground. New tramroutes turn out to be spectacularly expensive and environmentally disruptive, and provide disturbingly little capacity for their cost

Croydon to Highgate is pretty much the route Thameslink already covers, and its £6 bn upgrade more or less provides a north-south equivalent of Crossrail, coming fully onstream about the same time.

One real question that has to be asked about new urban transport is how necessary Big Projects really are. Car use has fallen over the past few years (in London, more to do with improvements in public transport and consumer choice than the recession), and there is a serious possibility the web etc makes physical transport less important.

Within England, there's a strong case that upgrading existing links, or restoring what Beeching killed, matter more than whizzy new lines. Travel time from Oxford will be reduced (and from my bit of the Oxford exurbs dramatically reduced) by a mile of track from an existing Park & Ride to the much faster track into Marylebone. Pressure on roads around our exurb will be eased by electrification and resignalling on the Southampton-Oxford line, with the two together creating the first stage in a planned Southampton-Oxford-Cambridge high density line transforming transport within England's "knowledge economy" belt. All costing hundreds of millions and taking a couple of years, rather than the tens of billions and decades RERs need.

Why is the UK about the only major country in Europe without a true high-speed rail network?

Its construction would be one thing to revive the moribund economical state Cameron's spending cuts have put the country in and around every new station there would be a fury of building activity - a seemingly no-brainer for this basket-case country and the HS line should also be State run, lock, stock and food trolley (bring small change please!).

>>Why is the UK about the only major country in Europe without a true high-speed rail network?<<

Because it is geographically quite small with the bulk of the population heavily concentrated in a limited number of areas quite close together. The relatively small gains in travelling times wouldn't be great enough to justify the investment, by comparison with France or Spain.

There'd be a much better return all round from full-scale electrification, increases in capacity on existing lines and improving public transport interchanges and feeder routes into the mainline railways. And doing without those for high-speed rail is a very high opportunity cost.

"Its construction would be one thing to revive the moribund economical state "

Precisely. There's no justifiable case in terms of transport efficiency, financial prudence, impact on the environment or regional economic policy.

But let's increase public debt by £50 billion and get Spanish construction companies to hire Romanian navvies to concrete the countryside over, creating an extravagant railway toy that has the perverse effect of INCREASING travel times for most people in Britain and sucks money out of real improvements in our railway, road and airport infrastructure.

It's jobs, innit?

While we're at it, though: how's America's infrastructure coming on? Built any docks or railways lately? Or roads leading to West Coast ports?